The History Of Computer Games: Part 1. Pre-1970s

The history of games is an incredibly long one. Really, games started at the beginning of time, before civilized societies, where life itself was a competition for survival. It is however computer games that we are looking at and that couldn't come about until we had advanced far enough in technology. It is hard to pin down who exactly invented the first computer as different people of different countries have biased claims to who came up with it first. Many believe the first freely programmable computer came about in 1936. It was called the Z1 and invented by Konrad Zuse. He was a construction engineer for an aircraft company in Germany at the beginning of the Second World War and he created a series of automatic calculators which were to help him with his lengthy engineering calculations. With the Z2 in 1939 he had completed the first fully functioning electro-mechanical computer, and by 1941 he had completed the Z3, which contained almost all the features of a modern computer as defined by John Von Neumann in 1946.

People have varied opinions on what the first 'video game' actually was. Many believe that it started with the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, which was developed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Settle Ray Mann for US missile defense systems in 1947. It was never marketed or sold to the public, but was patented in 1948. Whether this was the beginning  is debatable as the device was purely electromechanical and did not use any memory device, computer, or programming, however it could be looked at as the conception of the arcade device, as the game involved shooting a target using knobs and a button.

Img from http://pongmuseum.com/history/_picts/NIMROD-players.jpg

The first actual gaming computer was the NIMROD, created by the major UK electrial engineering and equipment firm, Ferranti International, for the purpose of playing the game Nim. This was significant as the first ever instance of a digital computer, designed specifically to play a game. It was a simple game, where you start with a number of piles of tokens - traditionally matches. Each player takes turns taking one or more tokens from anyones pile and the game continues until the last token is taken from the remaining pile. This was a game that had been played using physical versions for a very long time before it was programmed into machine version.

In 1952, a man named Alexander S. Douglas created OXO, a computer program for Noughts and Crosses. It was the first digital graphical simulation game, and ran on the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer which was produced by Maurice Wilkes and his team at The University of Cambridge. The EDSAC was one of the world's first 'stored-program' computers, and OXO is often sited as the first true computer game, as the player played against the computer. It did not obtain popularity however as it was limited to the computers in Cambridge.

A video game called Tennis for Two was developed by an American physicist, William A. Higinbotham in 1958. It ran on an analog computer and simulated a game of tennis or ping pong on an oscilloscope. It was one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, rather than a simple panel of lights, and it is widely regarded as the predecessor of Pong, which was one of the first and most recognized video arcade games of all time. In this game a blip of light (the tennis ball), bounces off a horizontal line at the bottom of a 5-inch diameter oscilloscope screen, with a vertical line in the middle representing the net. The game was controlled by the players with a small handheld metal box equipped with a dial and push button. This was also significant as these were the very first video game controllers.

The next year, another version of Noughts and Crosses, along with a collection of other interactive graphical programs, including Mouse in the Maze, were created on the TX-0 experimental computer at Massachusetts Institute of technology. These games incorporated the use of a light pen. In Mouse in the Maze, players used a light pen to place maze walls, dots that represented bits of cheese and a virtual mouse, also represented by a dot, was then released out into the maze.

The 1960s saw a large rise in computer game development, firstly with the game Spacewar! 1962, written by Steve Russell, on the DEC PDP-1 (a new computer at the time). Two players would each control a spacecraft, capable of firing missiles at each other, with a star in the center of the screen creating a hazard for the crafts. This was complemented by the PDP-1, which had the first operating system capable of allowing multiple users to share the computer simultaneously. Steve Russell never profited from Space Wars, and he introduced computer game programming and Spacewar to Nolan Bushnell, who went on to write the first coin-operated arcade game and start Atari Computers.

Then with Ralph Baer, who dreamed of bringing an interactive game to the TV and came up with the idea for an interactive video game machine. This led him to start and lead the development of the "Brown Box", in 1966. This was the very first home video game console and video game system. He also created a game named Corndog, which became the first video game ever to display on a standard television set. The next year, he assisted Bill Harrison, who created the first light gun and developed several video games with Bill Rusch. Then Ralph Baer went on to demo the first playable video game on a TV set, The Chase Game, which consisted of two squares chasing each other. Then in 1968 the first video console game prototype that was able to run several different games in to one unit was completed., and players could play games such as table tennis and target shooting.

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050298.htm
http://www.bmigaming.com/videogamehistory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_video_games
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/a/Spacewar.htm